16-Patient cardiac telemetry system

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power, short-range, real-time cardiac telemetry system designed to provide a monitoring solution for patients admitted either to a coronary care unit or to a cardiac rehabilitation exercise program. The developed custom firmware runs in real-time on a ZigBee compliant platform, taking advantage of a proprietary protocol working on top of IEEE 802.15.4 PHY layer to reduce the system’s overall power consumption. The system application software can be set to effectively provide monitoring trends and alarm notification for up to sixteen patients. A descriptive cross-sectional study conducted on eighty high-risk cardiac patients at the Cardiac Rehabilitation Center, attached to the Institute of Cardiology & Cardiovascular Surgery of Havana, reported a significant diagnostic accuracy of the system-level diagnosis algorithms for detecting premature ventricular contractions, as well as an ample correlation between the automatically and manually measured ST-segment depression. The developed system has been shown to be effective and flexible enough for monitoring cardiac patients.